Good. I hate so-called "progressive" taxation. There's nothing progressive about punishing success, it just smacks of jealousy and class warfare.
The wealthy should pay more because they benefit more. Directing wealth towards Bill Gates requires a worldwide army of lawmakers, police, and courts, diplomats, and armed forces. The government works for me and you as well, but not nearly so much. Put another way, reverting to anarchy would deflate his net worth a lot more than yours, and that's what taxes prevent.
Get over it, spread the word, and shop somewhere else!
I disagree. Why? Because companies like this want to have it both ways: to give the impression of offering the best deals, then to wriggle out of it one way or another.
I say, if they offer a good deal to the public, well they take the risk of somebody taking them up on it, and not leaving the store with a buch of crap they didn't want.
They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts.
I wouldn't even stretch to call people who would do this shoppers. Thats not looking for the best deal, thats borderline robbery.
Supposedly BestBuy wants rid of the 20% least-profitable shoppers. Do you believe that even 1% of shoppers engage in the tactic you mention? I do not believe it. (In fact I don't even see how it's possible since you have to cut out the UPC symbol for the rebate, and I doubt they accept returns with a missing UPC).
No, they're just hanging out a few "poster children" to justify dumping the 20% of customers who are smart enough to know what's really a "best buy."
KRAMER: You know what I'm gonna do? (heading for the door) I'm gonna return this.
JERRY: You're returning used fruit?
KRAMER: Jerry this peach is sub par.
(Kramer exits)
[location: Joe's]
JOE: So what do you want me to do?
KRAMER: I want restitution.
JOE: Restitution? You want restitution? Why should I give you restitution?
KRAMER: Because it's no good.
JOE: When you put that fruit out, that's where it ends for me.
KRAMER: It's still your fruit, you gotta stand behind your fruit.
JOE: I stand behind my fruit.
KRAMER: So...
JOE: Hey, you got a bad peach? That's an act of God. He makes the peaches. I don't make the peaches, I sell the peaches. You have a problem? You talk to him.
KRAMER: You know this whole place is going vrrrrrrrrrrrrt, downhill. I could have come in here last week with a bad plum but I let it go.
JOE: Well let me put a solution for ya: do your business elsewhere, I don't want your business.
KRAMER: Oh now you don't want my business.
JOE: No, I don't want your business and from this moment you're banned from the store, you're banned!
The fact that ACPI works as well as it does in Linux and *BSD is due to a large number of volunteers.
From what I've seen it doesn't work well enough to be at all useful.
Your choices are either to: a) fix it yourself and submit patches b) wait til someone else fixes it c) punt and use Microsoft Windows XP.
Punt in the other direction and use APM instead of ACAPI. IBM laptops (like the T40 you mentioned - I'm using one right now) seem to work decently well with APM, at least once you figure out all the gotchas, such as it will lock up if you suspend to RAM while the AGP modules (necessary for OpenGL accel) are loaded.
Fact is getting laptop features to work on Linux is rough going and I haven't noticed any improvement in the past 2 or 3 years.
Stop right there, before I fall back to complaining about "slashvertizements."
Seriously, I think this is a very cool device. I don't see how anybody who owns more than two of these devices separately can fail to see the utility. Everything needs a battery, everything needs a screen, and almost everything benefits from wireless communication. It'd be crazy not to roll them together.
Early adopters are suckers in my mind, the costs are large, and I don't see any percievable benefit.
Video games (and most other tech toys) have no "percievable" benefit, period.
Online games in particular really are more fun right at first - everybody's skill level is more equal, and you can still find your own novel tricks and strategies, instead of just visiting some web page to see it all spelled out.
Plus, we're talking about a console game here, which (unlike PC games) don't go into the bargin bin after a month, and have considerable resale value. if you don't wait too long.
I mean, they can't go to eBay and say "This was sold 4 days early! Trust me!"
Well, they can, because the box says "Limited Collector's Edition." I suppose there's some chance that the buyer actually IS a collector and the game will never be opened.
More likely the $265 bidder is a personal assistant to some divorced bigwig who wants to make sure his son gets something better from him than from his ex.
But when the top-rated dual-layer writer (NEC's ND-3500A) is only $68, dual-layer is a no-brainer. With cheap, serviceable drives for them, the media are sure to come down within a few months.
Good point, because where there are two or three good applications that perform a specific chore, most distros always choose the worst, most bloated one of the bunch....wait..no.
Wait... yes. They often pick the most bloated software, because it is often the best looking and has the most features. Bloated software is often a fine choice for newer, more powerful computers. That's why there's an opening for VectorLinux.
RTA. VectorLinux isn't about patchsets or compile options:
Whenever possible (which is most of the time) in cases where there are two or three
good applications to perform a specific chore, they would choose to include the most lightweight one out of the bunch for inclusion into the final release. This is what makes VectorLinux what it is, and always has been.
Can you take any linux distro and hand-pick all the lightweight software for an old box yourself? Sure, with enough elbow grease. Or you can use VectorLinux, because they already did it for you.
Instead of having 48 cameras around the subject so you can select a vantage point from any angle, why not just have one camera and ask the lazy bum to move around a little?
Besides, I'd rather not be looked at from all sides at once. Of 48 cameras, odds are at least one is looking exactly up your nose.
Roger that. I've been running my own linux PVR for a few years now using custom software rather than MythTV. It's more like a hobby than a "solution".
Anways, my point: I wonder if a new startup could sell a PVR that does what customers want. The key would be staying small enough that you didn't need deals with the content producers to feed your company. The major obstacle I see is DRM.
I'm not too worried about outsourcing to Canada - people there have a good standard of living and won't work for free. It's the prospect of competing against people with $50 / month mortgages that bothers me.
There's generally a 5-10% performance hit just from having code that might possibly throw an exception, depending on your compiler's implementation.
Just to be extra clear to avoid potential confusion: This is a true statement for C++, the language in which we are talking about. However, modern languages like Java and C# do not incur this performance penalty.
What's that supposed to mean? You can't compile Java or C# programs without support for exceptions to see if they will run faster, can you?
An illustration of how everyone wants ".com", no matter how appropriate. I could joke about how politicians are for sale and thus should be in.com, but really, it's just dumbing down the whole naming system.
It's the naming system itself that's wrong - top level domains (org, com, edu) were a dumb idea in the first place.
They serve no useful technical purpose. By far most DNS lookups are in.com, so they're irrelevant for load spreading (and there are other ways to spread load that don't impact users).
But the real problem with them is they aren't informative. 4 (or so) useless characters. They don't effectively expand the namespace, because people mentally filter them out so companies want to be registered in each top level domain.
But while this may work well for hobbyists and academics who have a lot of freedom in deciding what to work on, I have trouble seeing how it applies to the business world where there is a specific end goal and a deadline for it.
Re-read the question he was answering:
Preston: Do you have any advice for people starting to undertake large open source projects? What have you learned by managing the Linux kernel?
Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project.
That's "people undertaking large open source projects," not corporations undertaking large proprietary projects.
Maybe that's why most corporate software projects fail (at least if you listen to the "software crisis" people). And even in the business world I think many are accepting iterative methodologies where you give up trying to know in advance exactly where you'll wind up, because it never works out that way anyhow.
Most OSS projects "fail" too (a quick consultation of sourceforge.net should prove that point), but I think Linus' point is that at least then you haven't spent your life over-engineering some grand framework nobody cares about.
Slashdot Mirror
I say, if they offer a good deal to the public, well they take the risk of somebody taking them up on it, and not leaving the store with a buch of crap they didn't want.
No, they're just hanging out a few "poster children" to justify dumping the 20% of customers who are smart enough to know what's really a "best buy."
Has the shuttle ever achieved a turnaround time of anything like 60 days?
I'm confused about whether this card would do anything for me. Does it only work with broadcast media? Not satellite, not cable?
KRAMER: You know what I'm gonna do? (heading for the door) I'm gonna return this.
JERRY: You're returning used fruit?
KRAMER: Jerry this peach is sub par.
(Kramer exits)
[location: Joe's]
JOE: So what do you want me to do?
KRAMER: I want restitution.
JOE: Restitution? You want restitution? Why should I give you restitution?
KRAMER: Because it's no good.
JOE: When you put that fruit out, that's where it ends for me.
KRAMER: It's still your fruit, you gotta stand behind your fruit.
JOE: I stand behind my fruit.
KRAMER: So...
JOE: Hey, you got a bad peach? That's an act of God. He makes the peaches. I don't make the peaches, I sell the peaches. You have a problem? You talk to him.
KRAMER: You know this whole place is going vrrrrrrrrrrrrt, downhill. I could have come in here last week with a bad plum but I let it go.
JOE: Well let me put a solution for ya: do your business elsewhere, I don't want your business.
KRAMER: Oh now you don't want my business.
JOE: No, I don't want your business and from this moment you're banned from the store, you're banned!
KRAMER: But what am I gonna do for fruit?
Sorry I screwed up my blockquotes, the "From what I've seen it doesn't work well enough to be at all useful" part is mine, not quoted.
Seriously, I think this is a very cool device. I don't see how anybody who owns more than two of these devices separately can fail to see the utility. Everything needs a battery, everything needs a screen, and almost everything benefits from wireless communication. It'd be crazy not to roll them together.
Online games in particular really are more fun right at first - everybody's skill level is more equal, and you can still find your own novel tricks and strategies, instead of just visiting some web page to see it all spelled out.
Plus, we're talking about a console game here, which (unlike PC games) don't go into the bargin bin after a month, and have considerable resale value. if you don't wait too long.
More likely the $265 bidder is a personal assistant to some divorced bigwig who wants to make sure his son gets something better from him than from his ex.
"Wow," I thought. "It must be nice to have a net worth up there at $0. Thanks to credit cards I'm still paying off a sandwich I ate 5 years ago!"
But when the top-rated dual-layer writer (NEC's ND-3500A) is only $68, dual-layer is a no-brainer. With cheap, serviceable drives for them, the media are sure to come down within a few months.
Besides, I'd rather not be looked at from all sides at once. Of 48 cameras, odds are at least one is looking exactly up your nose.
Anways, my point: I wonder if a new startup could sell a PVR that does what customers want. The key would be staying small enough that you didn't need deals with the content producers to feed your company. The major obstacle I see is DRM.
I'm not too worried about outsourcing to Canada - people there have a good standard of living and won't work for free. It's the prospect of competing against people with $50 / month mortgages that bothers me.
I think Sun is fudding Java by not using it for the desktop. At least it certainly raises the question, "why not in Java?"
They serve no useful technical purpose. By far most DNS lookups are in .com, so they're irrelevant for load spreading (and there are other ways to spread load that don't impact users).
But the real problem with them is they aren't informative. 4 (or so) useless characters. They don't effectively expand the namespace, because people mentally filter them out so companies want to be registered in each top level domain.
A 486/33 is useless, even for a mundane task like web browsing.
Maybe that's why most corporate software projects fail (at least if you listen to the "software crisis" people). And even in the business world I think many are accepting iterative methodologies where you give up trying to know in advance exactly where you'll wind up, because it never works out that way anyhow.
Most OSS projects "fail" too (a quick consultation of sourceforge.net should prove that point), but I think Linus' point is that at least then you haven't spent your life over-engineering some grand framework nobody cares about.